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Rob Ford story inspires Toronto artists

Ford zine Everything Is Fine pulled together in days by Emily M. Keeler of Little Brother Magazine

Emily M. Keeler, editor of Little Brother Magazine, put out a call for fiction about Rob Ford that turned into the zine Everything Is Fine. (Chris So / Toronto Star)

By Brianna GoldbergSpecial to the Star

Mon., July 1, 2013

As the saga of Rob Ford continues to twist and turn, it increasingly seems that truth may be stranger than fiction, which means it’s the perfect time to make fiction even stranger.

“There was this story about a man living in the apartment complex on Dixon Rd. (the one allegedly connected to a videotape that appeared to show Ford smoking crack cocaine). It was a legitimate journalism story but written in a way that didn’t feel real to me,” says Emily M. Keeler, editor of Little Brother Magazine.

“It was almost too absurd. I wasn’t able to invest in the political implications of the story anymore. I felt like I was reading a piece of literature.”

Keeler took to Twitter and Facebook in search of Ford fiction, hoping it would help her digest the news. A few projects popped up, but not enough to satisfy. So at 2 in the morning she sent an email to local writers and, five days later, Everything Is Fine, a zine of fan fiction about Rob Ford, was sent to the printer.

The results range from wacky tales about Ford the ROBot to ominous landscapes of confusion and menace. (It’s now available to purchase online at Little Brother Magazine, and at Type Books and Art Metropole.)

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“It was a nice reminder to me that literature can be responsive to the world and events, and still be a part of it at the same time,” said Keeler.

The Ford fan-fiction zine is of many art projects developing as the city tries to make sense of its mayor. In an ironic twist, artists who have often found themselves opposing Ford and his policies are now giving a more nuanced portrayal of the mayor’s humanity. Gone are cheap gravy train jokes as new and more complicated depictions take shape.

Spencer Gordon, author of the short story collection Cosmo from Coach House Books, says he normally edits a story for months or years. But his Ford fan fiction was delivered in just two days. Gordon’s piece is an eerie confession from the point of view of Doug Ford, laced with sinister memories of a shark attack in Mexico. Gordon says it would be easy enough to “pile on the ridicule.”

“But what I’d rather read is something that really humanizes those people and makes me come away from the piece with a radically different understanding in my own sense of who that person is.”

That kind of approach can make for a tough crowd when audiences are hungry for pot shots at the mayor, especially with improv comedy, where audience suggestions help build the show.

“We use it as a bridge to something else,” says Naomi Snieckus, one half of The National Theatre of the World, an improv company group now in residence with Soulpepper Theatre. She and partner Matt Baram unintentionally performed Ford-related scenes during their recent run of Script Tease shows.

“When they say ‘Rob Ford,’ we say, ‘We know what the news is telling you, but how do you feel about it?’ Then people have that discussion about being let down or betrayed, and suddenly there’s a personal opinion behind the cold facts. Then we can inject heart into the play.”

It’s the theatrical mission of Snieckus and Baram to take those suggestions and create something rooted in improv, then invest it with extra thematic and emotional heft. In a recent show ad-libbing on two pages by playwright and screenwriter Jason Sherman, they were cast as fetuses in the womb; to add in an audience-requested Ford reference, the fetuses comically debated whether they wanted to be born into a world with such a mayor.

It’s not the first time that Baram has worked with Ford as a muse: he wrote It’s a Wonderful Toronto: The Rob Ford Holiday Spectacular! performed at Theatre Passe Muraille. The show starred Paul Bates, an actor with a flare for mayoral stories, who’s also played Mel Lastman in SARSical and appeared in CTV’s Dan for Mayor.

“The best thing about it is taking our favourite idiosyncrasies about those guys and exploding them to comic extremes. So when I was Mel Lastman it was all about panic and wild enthusiasm. With Ford, it’s extreme confidence and stubbornness and 100 per cent sure I’m right at all times,” says Bates.

Bates says though the Ford story grows less overtly comic, there’s still a way to present it with humour. “You’ve just got to make sure you do it in a smart way,” he says. “If I did it now, I’d have to play a compelling dual role of Rob Ford and Slurpy (the name for an alleged Ford look-alike).”

He says audiences looking for clever riffs on, if not outright references to, the Ford story can check out Christy Bruce’s upcoming Fringe show, The Soaps! A Live Improvised Soap Opera: City Hall Edition. Best to line up early: the Rob Ford Holiday Spectacular packed in audiences even before crack pipes were on the public radar.

But the new era of Ford-critiquing art isn’t just for paying patrons: a wave of mayoral music is now being uploaded to YouTube in genres as diverse as dance, rap and punk. And graffiti artists are offering their commentary.

“It’s interesting the suburbs voted him in, but he’s engaged the downtown core in ways we didn’t really anticipate,” said Bates. “Sometimes they engage him in really unimaginative, angry ways, but now you see them engaging him in cool ways that are more about art and communicating, and I think that’s great.”

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